Dr Katja Kivinen has been appointed new Head of the FIMM Technology Centre and she started her new position on September 16, 2019.

Katja Kivinen has expertise in both genetics and bioinformatics, and recently, she has contributed significantly to the development of cardiovascular research at the University of Cambridge. Her interests include the development and optimization of biomedical research services and resolving challenges concerning high-throughput data production, integration, and sharing in support of the prediction, diagnostics, and treatment of clinical conditions.

She obtained her MSc degree in genetics from the University of Helsinki in 1998, and her PhD in bioinformatics in 2004 from the University of Cambridge and EMBL. After her first post-doctoral period at Karolinska Institute, she moved to Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in 2006. She initially started her career as a computational biologist, and then became senior staff scientist and scientific manager in the newly founded Malaria Programme.

In 2014, she was appointed Manager of the newly founded Cardiovascular Research Centres at the University of Cambridge. During the last five years, her research community grew from 60 to >500 researchers and at the same time, the proportion of interdisciplinary research articles doubled. She has been a founding member in two pre-eclampsia research consortia (FINNPEC and InterPregGen), and plans to lead the analysis of FINNPEC samples that are being genotyped at FIMM Technology Centre.

Photo: Jean-Luc Benazet